Toronto will take a crucial step toward officially selling itself to the world at large as a “music city” akin to Austin or Nashville on Thursday with the unveiling of an ambitious new branding initiative and a concerted push to establish a dedicated “music office” at city hall.

“4479 Toronto: Music meets world” is the slogan behind which a dedicated coalition of local musicians, labels, live-music promoters, studio owners and the like assembled behind the Canadian industry lobby group Music Canada to propel Toronto to global notoriety as a locus point for international music production, performance and tourism over the months and years ahead.

Both Ward 15 Councillor Josh Colle and Tourism Toronto representative Andrew Weir will be on hand at the Hyatt-Regency hotel — the epicentre of this week’s North by Northeast festival and conference — alongside representatives of NXNE and historic local live venue Massey Hall for the announcement this afternoon of the marketing campaign, aimed at further nurturing the city’s enviably healthy music scene and promoting the GTA as a destination for music fans from around the world.

“Those of us in the music industry take it for granted that everybody knows we have one of the best music scenes in the world, but that’s not true,” said Music Canada president Graham Henderson — who’s had much success in convincing both the local municipal government and the reigning provincial Liberals over the past year of the dollars-and-cents value of Toronto’s internationally admired music community — on Tuesday. Internationally, however, although the city’s reputation as an exporter of world-class talent has grown exponentially during the 2000s thanks to a surfeit of critically endorsed and commercially viable local acts such as Drake, Feist, the Weeknd, Metric, Crystal Castles and Broken Social Scene, the fact remains that nobody automatically “thinks music when they think Toronto.”

The “4479 Toronto” campaign, named for the city’s geographical longitude and latitude of 43.65 and 79.4 degrees, respectively, aspires to change that. And it has, as first put forth in a Music Canada report presented to the city at this time last year, found an ideal municipal model of how to exploit a city’s musical riches to the benefit of everyone involved in Austin, Tex., home to the ridiculously successful South by Southwest and Austin City Limits music festivals and the self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World.”

Affixing a brand identity to Toronto’s globally recognized pool of musical talent, concert venues, record labels, recording studios and attendant supporting infrastructure is but the first step, 4479’s creators hope, toward similarly establishing music as a stable pillar of the GTA’s cultural and industrial economies. The next is enshrining council’s growing recognition of music’s value to the city, already tacitly acknowledged in the specific allotment set aside for music amid the revenues earmarked for arts and culture in Toronto’s billboard tax, in the form of a Toronto music office that would function in much the same way the city’s film office already does: by cutting through any unnecessary red tape that might unduly hamper the industry’s ability to thrive and expand at home while simultaneously drawing further business in from abroad.

To that end, Colle, who received a thorough grounding in Austin’s music policies from numerous city officials during his first trip to SXSW this past March, has lately been leading an internal charge at city hall in concert with a united front of local music-industry stakeholders to pursue a comparable strategy here. The ideas have already been presented to 40 of 44 Toronto city councillors to encouragingly positive response.

“I’m feeling a bit of momentum,” said Colle Wednesday. “We’ve got this cool asset right here that we haven’t leveraged, and it seems like everyone here is waking up to it. … I think people are buying in. Everyone’s a music fan to some degree, but they’re starting to recognize that this is an economic-growth cluster. It’s one that employs a lot of people, it’s got a lot of start-ups and a lot of young entrepreneurs and lots of other business opportunities. It’s not just seen through a cultural lens anymore.”

The proposal to create a Toronto music office modelled after Austin’s will come to a vote before the City of Toronto’s economic-development committee on June 25, after which it will move to the council as a whole. Colle and Henderson are both optimistic it will pass, and their next immediate goal is to symbolically “twin” Toronto — the third-largest concert market in North America — with Austin as cross-border “music cities” that can trade talent and cool in both directions for years to come.

This all comes at a time when the concrete economic-impact figures lately put forth by organizations such as Music Canada and the Canadian Independent Music Association — which last year released a study showing Ontario (read: Toronto) as the source of 80 per cent of the Canadian music industry’s annual $303-million contribution to the national GDP — appear to give the domestic music industry some traction with politicians.

The 4479 Toronto campaign comes hot on the heels of the provincial government’s pledge, announced last month by Finance Minister Charles Sousa and Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport Michael Chan during a showy early-morning press conference at Lee’s Palace, to create a $45-million Ontario Music Fund to support the production, distribution and performance of music in the province and to promote Ontario-made music across Canada and around the globe.

“I was just blown away by the sheer size of it,” Colle says of his experience in Austin at SXSW. “But more than the pandemonium was talking to their mayor and their economic-development guy and their chamber of commerce and their tourism board. They use it to attract companies, to attract jobs, skilled labour, head offices, conferences — it’s just a tool for them.

“It makes a lot of sense, and the best example we have of it locally is film — and we did that 25 years ago.”

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